Archives for April 2013

I am a big fan of debunking conspiracy theories. And, if I die today, I can lay some claim to promoting rational thought. My article on UFO theories was reposted by a NASA astrophysicist. The fact that you can read this post is completely attributable to the development of accessible porn has been duly documented. So, for all my horny literate fans, today’s blog is for you. One of our followers, yes – I am using the royal “we,” is a guy named F. Grey Parker. He plays in a band called Sister Soleil and answers his phone when I call. He took a moment out of his busy day to write the best refutation of any conspiracy theory I have ever read. I will now share his genius with you.

“I’ve Got Your Conspiracy Right Here, Motherfucker” (a rant)

By F. Grey Parker

You know what lies behind the motivations of every die-hard, “it’s a secret conspiracy,” “false flag” spewing nut?

Narcissism. Period.

They insist that only THEY know “more.” They insist that if you don’t agree with THEM, you are a “slave,” or you’re “stupid,” or you’re a “fool.”

Only THEY have the grandglorious intelligence to “see.”

Only THEY have the “wisdom.”

Only THEY can read the “secret signs.”

Only THEY (who are so much more amazing then “we,”) know that there has to be a link between Boston – Aurora -Sandy Hook – Oklahoma – Waco- Columbine – 9/11- the death of their neighbor’s dog – Vincent Foster – the FALN – and the saboteurs who gave the rebels the plan to the Death Star.

Fuck them.

Fuck them running.

I hate to wish ill upon anyone.

That said, when it’s THEIR mother or brother or sister or CHILD who has had their legs blown off by a lunatic following the call of his or her own inner demons?

I demand that THEY allow ME total access to wander through THEIR grief and declare that Alex Jones has a right to scrape THEIR loved one’s flesh, blood and bone off the floor for a fucking web show. And ad sales. And licensing to Glenn Beck so he can continue to sell Gold while it’s tanking.

If America actually was the hive of super-capable and terribly awesome tyranny you claim it is…?

I wouldn’t be putting up with your public pronouncements at all.

Because the “secret team” would have put YOU and the rest of your cowardly, worm-ridden-filth out of MY misery long ago.

So, in closing. Dear pseudo-political narcissists…

FUCK YOU.

And, by FUCK YOU, what he really means is “fuck you.” He’s really very polite.

As was noted on my last podcast, America offers numerous media venues for people to express themselves, see Alex Jones as proof that the filters need not be rational, but that does not mean that every viewpoint is accurate.

Or, to keep things simple, Rush Limbaugh has demanded the arrest of every drug user not named Rush Limbaugh.

Consider the source and keep things in perspective.

Digits – “Love is Only Affection” (NSFW official video) from Seth Mendelson on Vimeo.

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Man, what a great week to be a complete whack job. I don’t care if you’re left wing, right wing or the whole flipping bird, if you’re a paranoid lunatic this week has been manna from heaven for you. It’s had everything; bombs, Muslims, manure, cops, police states, the NRA, Facebook and our beloved Kenyan President allegedly espousing socialist values. And most of the stuff was completely meaningless. The guy on the roof in Boston? Probably a Dish Network repairman who happened to be in the area. The number of turban wearing terrorists seen racing from the scene in West Texas is still zero. That is also the same number of guns confiscated by the Obama administration. Which, surprisingly, is also the same number of times that the CIA has hacked intro my Facebook account. But none of that matters. What matters is what YOU think, not what FACTS are.

Let’s start over on the left wing. Many pro-Bama blogs are reveling in the fact that the state of Texas hasn’t inspected the exploding manure plant since 1995. That is wrong. The plant was inspected in 2006. And it was found to be unsafe. And it was fined. But, because they paid the fine, they were never inspected again. Yeah, Texas rolls like that. The nice people at Think Progress have a succinct take on it all.

It’s impossible to know at this point whether unsafe workplace conditions were a direct cause of this disaster, but we do know that it was cited for failing to obtain or qualify for a permit in 2006 after a complaint of a strong ammonia smell, a smell that was reported to be “very bad last night.” The plant hasn’t been inspected in the past five years, and in fact only six Texas fertilizer plants were inspected in that time. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is chronically understaffed, which means that a given plant like West Fertilizer can only expect to get a state inspection once every 67 years on average.

Texas is a great state for companies. Not so much so for people. Of course Texas is the state where children who meet the state’s academic requirements in High School are ineligible for state college.

The report notes that the Fordham Institute gave the state’s history standards a grade of “D,” calling it a “politicized distortion of history,” that is “both unwieldy and troubling” while “offering misrepresentations at every turn.”

These misrepresentations, Erekson writes, include excluding Native Americans from the standards curriculum until recently and citing states’ rights as a cause of the Civil War when Texas did not cite it in their historical “Declaration of Causes.”

That’s actually the good news when it comes to education in Texas.

On the NRA front things seem to be circling the drain. Their current president avoided military service due to failing a psyche evaluation and the dude who set the tone they live by these days killed an illegal immigrant in Texas (which turns out to be legal down there).

But, despite those auspicious facts, one of their biggest sources or personal revenue just pulled the plug and ran away. Adolphus Busch IV, of Budweiser fame, has taken his rifles and gone home.

Adolphus Busch IV, heir to the Busch family brewing fortune, resigned his lifetime membership in the National Rifle Association on Thursday, writing in a letter to NRA President David Keene, “I fail to see how the NRA can disregard the overwhelming will of its members who see background checks as reasonable.”

The resignation, first reported by KSDK, came a day after the Senate rejected a series of amendments to a gun control bill, including a bipartisan deal to expand background checks for gun sales. The NRA had vigorously opposed all those measures.

“The NRA I see today has undermined the values upon which it was established,” wrote Busch. “Your current strategic focus clearly places priority on the needs of gun and ammunition manufacturers while disregarding the opinions of your 4 million individual members.”

I should note that Busch joined the NRA before they were overrun by nutjobs. He’s just a guy who likes to hunt. Speaking as someone who has hunted and enjoyed it and who was taught gun safety at a young age, I can empathize with him. But, since he is white, rich and republican, his word means much more in the circles of the NRA than mine ever will. Hopefully someone will listen.

Since we’re leaning to the right now, let’s tilt all the way over.

As anyone who has not been in a coma knows, the police captured Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, the alleged Boston Marathon bomber, just a day after killing his brother in a wild shoot out (coming soon to a theater near you). He had hid in a boat which is, quite possibly, the worst get-away vehicle known to man when you are surrounded by concrete. Let him be a lesson to remind you that we all live with the decisions we make.

Okay, so he’s caught. His family is Chechan. Mine is Irish. Neither fact matters. He is Muslim. So is my next door neighbor. It doesn’t matter. He worshiped his older brother. So does almost every little brother. It doesn’t matter. The older brother got dissed after winning the Gold Gloves. That is cause for a well written letter to the editor, not an excuse for blowing up innocent civilians.

Simply put what we do know is almost meaningless, beyond the fact that they caught the right guy. Well, almost all of what we know is meaningless. News Busters is going to be keeping a close eye on the media to see if they report the important fact that Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev may have voted for Obama.

Several posts on what several news organizations have confirmed as the Twitter profile of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev indicate that that the 19-year-old Chechnyan immigrant was a supporter of Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.

If that is indeed the case, it does not mean that Obama has any sort of connection with or responsibility for the bombing suspect or his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. It does, however, completely reverse the fantasy that many American liberals were openly hoping for: that the bombing suspects might be revealed as Timothy McVeigh 2.0, someone whose very name they could use to smear and deride anyone who stands against their belief system. In other words, one of those “dog whistles” we keep hearing so much about.

Now that information has emerged which not only indicates the suspected bombers were not radical conservatives but that one of them appears to be a supporter of President Obama, how widely will it be spread in the endless series of reports trying to report as many details about the two suspects?

Several news agencies have tracked down a Twitter account which is believed to belong to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two brothers whom the FBI has identified as the people responsible for a pressure cooker bomb which killed three people and injured nearly 150.

Well, it was good of him to note that our president is not suspected of being involved in an act of terror. For the record Timothy McVeigh was a big fan of Bush the elder. I don’t remember that nugget coming up at his trial.

Do you know why?

IT DIDN’T FREAKING MATTER!!!!!!

Whatever drove the Tsarnaev brothers to do what they did is almost meaningless. There is no rationalization that justifies killing innocent people outside of a war zone. And even with that exception things get murky.

Nevertheless, I’m glad they caught him. If only to ensure that he is not part of a larger plot or a member of some organization that means to do us harm. Something which I doubt at this point.

BTW, big UPS to NBC for noting that using white terrorists is easier in America than using Arabs. I’m sure no one will take advantage of that. I mean, seriously, thank God there are no white people in the world who wish us ill otherwise that could prove horribly prophetic.

Oy freaking vey.

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Every Friday or so I do a 15 minute radio show on a FOX! Sports affiliate based in Aurora. That’s their shiny logo to the right. Since we talk about everything from python hunts in Florida to the history of the Gospels there is one simple rule in place; I must be able to verify publicly any sources I cite. It has never once interfered with the show. I apply the same basic rule here and provide links that you, yes you, can click to find out more about anything you are reading about. FOX! News, which is a very different animal than FOX! Sports, takes a different tack. Instead of verifiable sources they use the, ever popular, “some people say” technique. That gets you high quality journalism that clearly, and confidently, states things like “Some people say that President Obama is really a lizard sent by, pork loving, Muslim aliens ….” and so on. What the hell, if you’re just going to be making stuff up anyway you may as well have some fun with it.

Oh well, the only people who take FOX! News seriously are the same ones who think that Wal Mart is for uppity folk.

That’s why serious people who want serious news turn to CNN. At least they used to. CNN, recently (under new management) has taken to the “I spoke to the guy who met the gal who walked the dog of the guy who met the guy who might know the gal who could possibly shed light on this issue or, at the very worst, tell us how Pop Tarts are made” school of journalism. It’s bad enough that they air crap like Get to the Point, which is based so far from reality as to make delusional people squirm.

Actual quote; “I’m a vegetarian but I love bacon.”

Yesterday CNN decided to set the bar so low I doubt that anyone will ever get under it. They spent an afternoon pretending that an arrest had been made in the Boston bombings.

Which was 100% wrong.

Marsha Guthrie has the whole story.

Questionable information from sources and a rush to be first contributed to a flurry of erroneous media reports Wednesday of an arrest in the deadly Boston Marathon bombing. CNN, the Associated Press, FoxNews.com and the Boston Globe were forced to backtrack on reports — all of which cited anonymous law enforcement sources — that an arrest had been made in the attack Monday that injured almost 200 and killed three, including an 8-year-old boy.

Meanwhile, the FBI took the unusual step of issuing a statement correcting the media and asking that it show restraint in its reporting and verify information “through appropriate official channels.”

Veterans of the TV news trenches say that while sources can often offer incomplete, misleading or bad information, the onus is on the news organization to properly vet that information.

“There’s nothing worse than having to backtrack on your story,” says one veteran producer. “Because then you get a reputation for being wrong.”

Such mistakes are nothing new in journalism, of course. The 2000 presidential election, the 1996 Atlanta Olympic bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City attack remain watershed moments for the news media in which serious mistakes were made in how they were covered. But the age of the instant Twitter update may have ramped up the rate of error with a string of faulty reports during more recent breaking news situations.

Multiple media outlets misidentified the shooter in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn., and also said the suspect’s mother was killed at the school. CNN and Fox News misreported the Supreme Court’s January decision on President Obama’s health care overhaul. ABC News correspondent Brian Ross erroneously linked Aurora, Colo., shooter James Holmes to the Tea Party. And early reports about the January 2011 Tucson, Ariz., shooting involving U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords said the congresswoman had died.

But the stakes now are particularly high for CNN, as the struggling cable news network attempts to reinvent itself under new chief Jeff Zucker.

“The game plan for CNN is to wait until a major story happens and then strut their stuff,” says independent news analyst Andrew Tyndall. “Anybody can make a mistake. But when CNN makes a mistake, it matters more to them because this is the one time that they can get eyeballs to sample them.”

CNN also came under significant criticism for its reporting that the suspect is a “dark-skinned male.” CBS News reported that the possible suspect is a white man wearing a “white or off-white baseball cap backwards.”

In a statement, CNN defended its decision to report that an arrest had been made. “CNN had three credible sources on both local and federal levels,” said a network spokesperson. “Based on this information, we reported our findings. As soon as our sources came to us with new information, we adjusted our reporting.”

The Globe reported that the (false) reports of a suspect in custody sent “spectators, photographers and reporters” flocking to “the federal courthouse on the South Boston waterfront, expecting the suspect to be brought there for a court appearance.”

NBC News’ Pete Williams was an early dissenter in the erroneous Boston Marathon reports, insisting on MSNBC that no arrests had been made even as CNN was sticking by its original story, which earned him plaudits from network executives.

“There’s no second guessing with Pete Williams,” says MSNBC president Phil Griffin. “There have been other times when others have gotten ahead of themselves. We don’t do it until we get clearance from a guy that everyone in this building trusts. And that has helped us through a lot of things.”

Williams also was among the reporters who correctly analyzed the Obamacare decision as other networks rushed to air with the findings from the dense report. And sources at ABC News say that the network’s black eye over the Aurora shooting has led to an abundance of caution in reporting breaking news stories. ABC News president Ben Sherwood has been cautioning producers and correspondents to be “extra vigilant in their reporting on this story,” said one source.

Certainly during a quickly evolving breaking news story, miscommunication can occur. In an effort to be transparent, CNN’s John King noted on the air that one of his law enforcement sources told him there was “significant blowback at the leaks.”

The AP, which reported that a suspect was in custody, also subsequently updated its story to say that the law enforcement official who briefed the wire service “stood by the information even after it was disputed.”

The scope of the investigation, which involves state, local and federal law enforcement also is likely contributing to the confusion. There were initial reports of five unexploded devices in the area. Multiple outlets reported that a “Saudi national” injured in the attacks was a suspect. The New York Post still had a story on its website late Tuesday saying that 12 people had been killed. Three people were killed in the twin bombings.

Meanwhile, officials have postponed a news conference scheduled for 5 p.m. ET Wednesday while offering no update on when it might be rescheduled.

All the way back on Tuesday I noted how rushing to judgement was never a good thing. Maybe someone can forward that memo to CNN.

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Mankind has had the ability to blow stuff up for millenia. However it is only in the last century or so that some people have decided that blowing up innocents is a viable way to get a message to the masses. Back in 1886, in our fair city, a militant labor activist tossed a bomb at police. What started out as the Haymarket Affair quickly became the Haymarket Riots. 11 people died and 4 were executed for the deed. Five if you count the one prisoner who killed himself rather than face the gallows. Most historians agree that the condemned were railroaded and were most likely innocent. Which means the coward who did the deed was never brought to justice. The Haymarket Riots are a prime example of how quickly things can go from bad to disastrous and cautionary tale of why we should never rush to justice.

Make no mistake about it. People who plant bombs, whether they be by a roadside, or in clinics, or anywhere else, are cowards. They want to bully from afar. They want to impose their will on others without having to face any personal consequences. They are despicable.

Yesterday a coward or cowards, we don’t know yet, left bombs along the route of the Boston Marathon. They timed the bombs to explode at around the four hour mark of the marathon. That is, traditionally, when the most amateurs cross the finish line. It is also when the race is the most crowded as friends and family gather near the finish line to cheer for their loved ones.

Simply put, the cowards were looking to maximize the number of dead and injured while avoiding any personal threat.

The true definition of a coward.

While there are already those sad souls who see a government plot here or take to their favorite social media site to demand that we bomb Pakistan (I do believe that these people would demand that we bomb Pakistan if they got a stale doughnut), the facts are that we know very little.

In many ways it is the not knowing that is more frightening.

We do know that the Pakistani Taliban made it abundantly clear that they had nothing to do with this. Since they hung out with Osama bin Laden I am guessing they aren’t worried about bad press or not being liked in America. In other words, I’d take them off the suspect list for now.

The sad thing is that the most likely suspect would be an American citizen. April 15th though the 19th is a wide set of hot button issues for right wing activists.

It was on April 19, 1995 when Timothy McVeigh attacked the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma and killed 168 people. That would become the worst domestic terrorist attack in American history.

April 19th is also the anniversary of the Branch Davidian catastrophe.

Add in Hitler’s birthday falling on tax day, people who hate the government in general and so on and you suddenly have a long list of U.S. citizens who could have perpetrated this.

That is not a happy thought.

If there is a happy thought in this it is knowing that the people of Boston will prevail. They will move on and live their lives. They will raise their families and love their friends. Like all victims of terror in this country, they will not let terror win.

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My ex wife was terrified of flying. She hinted at this problem but never fully shared her concerns. She also hated being away from me for extended periods of time. So, naturally, when I had a business trip to France I bought her a ticket. The first leg of the trip, to London, was uneventful. When we got there we were greeted by long line, the British love lines, and then were informed that the plane we were supposed to take to France was the subject of a bomb threat. She kind of lost her mind and refused to board a plane that was being screened by people wearing bomb repellent gear. As it turns out there are laws in the UK that state that if you refuse to get on a plane that is being swept for bombs the police can detain you for up to 72 hours to see if you were the person who planted the alleged bomb. So her choices were board the plane or go to jail in a foreign country. She, reluctantly, boarded the plane. To say that the next leg of our trip was tense would be an understatement of epic proportions. It was also on this leg of the trip that she discovered the European fascination with mayonnaise. It was on every sandwich offered. She hates mayonnaise. So I was sitting next to a terrified hungry woman who was learning, rapidly, to loathe Europe. It was not a great way to start a trip.

However, it turns out that her many fears may not have been illusory. Andy Greenberg reports that any terrorist with a cell phone can hijack your next flight.

Here’s an uncomfortable image to keep in mind during your next flight: A rogue hacker who can redirect planes at will with the touch of an Android phone’s screen.

That’s the frightening scenario laid out by Hugo Teso, a security researcher for the German IT consultancy N.Runs, in a presentation at the Hack In The Box security conference in Amsterdam Wednesday. By hijacking a protocol used to send data to commercial aircraft and exploiting bugs in flight management software built by companies including Honeywell, Thales and Rockwell Collins, Teso told the crowd that he could send radio signals to planes that would cause them to execute arbitrary commands such as changes in direction, altitude, speed, and the pilots’ displays.

“You can use this system to modify approximately everything related to the navigation of the plane,” Teso told me in an phone interview following his talk. “That includes a lot of nasty things.”

Read more about the researcher whosays he’s found hackable flaws in airplanes’ navigation systems

Hackers and security researchers have warned for years of vulnerabilities in next-generation air traffic control protocols. But Teso focused on a different protocol called Aircraft Communications Addressing and Report System, (ACARS) a simple data exchange system that has evolved over decades to now include everything from weather data to airline schedules to changes to the plane’s flight management system. (FMS)

Teso says that ACARS still has virtually no authentication features to prevent spoofed commands. But he spent three years reverse engineering the flight navigation software that receives ACARS signals to find bugs that allowed him to send his own commands to the systems, either from a software-defined radio that can be tuned to use ACARS or from a compromised airline system. In his talk, Teso demonstrated an Android application he built that allowed him to redirect a virtual plane with just a tap on a map application running on his Samsung Galaxy phone. “ACARS has no security at all. The airplane has no means to know if the messages it receives are valid or not,” he says. “So they accept them and you can use them to upload data to the airplane that triggers these vulnerabilities. And then it’s game over.”

In his presentation, Teso explained that he experimented on used FMS hardware he bought from eBay and FMS training simulation software that was advertised as containing some or all of the same code as the systems in real planes. In our interview he declined to specify exactly what vulnerabilities he discovered in that code, saying that he has instead contacted the Federal Aviation Administration and the European Aviation Safety Administration, and is working with the affected aerospace companies to fix the problems.

Honeywell, for its part, confirms that it’s been talking to Teso’s employer. But spokesperson Scott Sayres argues that Teso’s work doesn’t necessarily prove any real vulnerabilities in Honeywell’s equipment or software. “We take this seriously and we’re going to work with N.Runs to assess this,” says Sayres. “But as Teso readily admits, the version he used of our flight management system is a publicly available PC simulation, and that doesn’t have the same protections against overwriting or corrupting as our certified flight software.”

Teso’s supervisor at N.Runs, fellow security researcher Roland Ehlies, counters that the vulnerabilities Teso found in the FMS software weren’t related to the PC version he was testing, but rather to functions that would also exist in real planes. “From our perspective it would work with at minimum a bit of adaptation,” he says.

I’ve reached out to Rockwell Collins, Thales, the EASA and the FAA for comment and will offer an update if I hear back from them.

Both Honeywell’s Sayres and Teso agree that even if a hacker were able to alter the FMS through commands remotely sent over ACARS, the pilots of the plane should be able to override those malicious commands with their own valid ones. Nonetheless, Teso said in his presentation that at the very least, a hacker could perform disruptive stunts like causing the cockpits’ lights to blink wildly or the passengers’ pressurized air masks to drop.

Teso’s presentation is far from the first to raise the potential for hackers to disrupt air travel. Two talks at the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences last summer suggested that hackers could spoof or intercept signals sent using the next-generation air traffic control system Automated Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast or ADS-B. That trick might allow an attacker to suddenly generate the appearance of a non-existent plane in a pilot’s direct path, potentially causing chaos in the air.

Tricks with ACARS to disrupt or hijack planes’ flight management systems–if they bear out in real world tests beyond those Teso has performed–could be far more dangerous. Teso believes that the bugs he’s discovered in those navigation systems can be fixed. In the meantime, those in the cockpit would be wise to keep an eye on their autopilot.

General question; why is this software available to the public in the first place? Is there a huge demand for developing homemade auto-pilots? Secondly, why is this research being made public? Terrorists may not have nuclear weapons but they sure as hell have cell phones.

Anyway, the next time you hear a flight attendant telling someone to turn off their cell phone thank them. They may have just saved your life.

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